Great White Hope
by Potterworm
Summary: "You are the great white hope of the Gilmore clan. You are their angel sent from up above. You are the daughter they didn't have." That's what Lorelai told Rory after the debacle in 2x1 Sadie, Sadie. But what if that wasn't true?


**Disclaimer:** Lorelai, Rory, Emily, Richard, and all other recognizable _Gilmore Girls_ characters belong to Amy Sherman-Palladino, Dorothy Parker Drank Here Productions, and the WB. No infringement is intended.

 **Summary:** "You are the great white hope of the Gilmore clan. You are their angel sent from up above. You are the daughter they didn't have." That's what Lorelai told Rory after the debacle in 2x1 Sadie, Sadie. But what if that wasn't true?

 **Great White Hope**

 _By Potterworm_

" _You are the great white hope of the Gilmore clan. You are their angel sent from up above. You are the daughter they didn't have."_

-Lorelai

Rory's always been smart, damn smarter than the average Stars Hollow High student, but after a month at Chilton, she realized a simple fact: there was smart, and then there was _Chilton_ smart. She cried herself to sleep the night she realized she may not be able to use the latter to describe herself.

For the next month and a half, she worked herself ragged keeping up with the demanding curriculum, and she did okay. The other kids have finally stopped harassing her, finally stopped looking at her like competition, because she just _wasn't._ When Rory got assignments back in class, she didn't have to hide herself in shame – it wasn't not as though she failed - but she was not boasting about her perfect A either. She was a B student, sometimes even C. When an A+ sneaks in, Rory was always a little surprised. She had learned not to expect them; that part of her life is over.

At first, she had been ashamed of her lower GPA, flushing when Paris boasted about her perfect average, and that had carried over into her Stars Hollow life. It had taken her mother a straight week of bugging her before Rory had admitted in a voice that came out surprisingly young, "I don't think I'm smart enough for Chilton."

" _What_?" Lorelai had said. "What do you mean?"

"I got a C on my English paper." Rory looked down at that, not able to meet her mother's eyes. She knew her mother had been smart in high school, but she also knew that her mother wouldn't have gotten freaked out by a C - for herself, not for Rory. Rory was different; Rory was supposed to better, supposed to be smarter.

"The one you worked on every night for a week?" Lorelai asked, trying to figure out what had happened. She shifted on the couch next to Rory and put down the carton of ice cream she had been eating.

"Yeah," Rory said, staring resolutely at a space on the wall. She was _not_ going to cry.

After a beat of silence, Lorelai asked, "Did you figure out what you did wrong?"

"Mr. Medina said my thesis was weak and that my presentation of facts was lacking the eloquence to properly support my idea," Rory said robotically. Quote. End quote. Red ink on white paper.

"Oh, Rory. I'm sure you'll do better on the next one." Lorelai's voice was compassionate, but Rory still stiffened at it. It wasn't the soothing voice, it was the assumption that Rory _could_ do better that bothered her.

What if she couldn't?

"Will you help me study?" Rory asked, feeling almost ashamed. She had never needed help studying before.

"Sure," Lorelai said, and for the half dozen weeks that followed, Lorelai did exactly that. Every night, she would quiz Rory on information and grill her with mathematical algorithms that Lorelai herself found to be gibberish.

Rory was worn ragged, and Lorelai vowed to relieve any stress that she could. She went to Parent's Night and paid close attention to everything that was said, relaying all information about the AP exams to Rory. She kept her head down as she took notes on every teacher's curriculum, only briefly noting that Rory's English teacher was very attractive.

Later, when Rory was looking over the notes Lorelai had taken and saw a doodle in the corner about Mr. Medina being a 9 on the date-able scale, her eyes lingered on her mother, who was buried in the freezer, looking for tater tots. Rory was grateful to her mother, but also felt a pain of guilt. Her mother's doodle had quickly morphed into detailed, serious notes.

(When Lorelai popped the tater tots in the oven and spent the next twenty minutes discussing the science curriculum instead of mooning over "this hot guy," Rory wasn't sure she recognized her anymore.)

GREATWHITEHOPE

Rory kept running into Dean, the boy who had almost kept her from Chilton. (She wondered if it would've been better if he had.) He flirted with her and talked to her and it was clear that he's hopelessly falling for her.

She had not had any deeply personal conversations with him, though she knew there had been near misses. She wasn't sure if she wanted to have a heart-to-heart, because she thinks it would break her heart to rebuff his advances.

But he couldn't really want a girlfriend who studied for six hours every night, could he?

Rory felt like she missed out on opportunities sometimes, with Dean and with Lane, when she felt left out of Rory's new life. Her mother offered to let her drop out of Chilton on a dozen different occasions. But Rory didn't want to.

She was considered exceptionally bright once. And she wanted to be that again, not this middle-of-the-pack student. She wanted to read Kafka and watch video footage of Christine Amanpour and she wanted to be more than she is now. She wanted to go to Harvard and be in the top ten percent of her class and be on the school paper and she wanted her mom not to look so worried about her.

She wanted to be smart.

(But what if she wasn't?)

 **Author's Note:** Found this old story on my computer. Not sure when I wrote it, but figured I would post it. I'm sure it came about the same time that I wrote "(A Lack of) Happiness." I think I had planned for it to become a chaptered fic, but here we are.


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